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Monday, July 2, 2007

Corruptions of the politicians

The confessions are available on CDs and on the Internet. After hearing the confessions, you can't wait to ask some questions. Do the investigators have a magic wand which makes the suspects so easily and meticulously confess their involvement in illegal money making?

How did these confessions become available on CDs? How true are they? We don't know the answers to these questions, but we do know that during an interrogation only two parties are involved -- interrogators and suspects. No other people have access to that setting. The government cannot and, I am sure, has not officially released the confessions because they are useless until the court accepts them as true.

It is well known that people make confessions under duress, and to avoid harsh treatment during interrogations. And they can rightfully deny them before the court, and can even complain against the method of interrogation.

Confessions are only useful for collecting further evidence against suspects. It is dangerous to treat people as corrupt just on the basis of the confessions which they gave during interrogation. If we do so, we run the risk of influencing the court towards making biased judgments.

We Bangladeshis are, by nature, suspicious about the honesty of the people in power. We are rightly so, because we have seen many people becoming filthy rich by misusing state power and money. But I think we need to wait and see.

We need to leave it to the court, not the interrogators, to decide who is corrupt and who is not. For the sake of establishing the rule of law, the court must decide the corruption charges without any external influence.

If politicians like Hasina and Khaleda are found guilty by the court, they must pay the penalty, and they must lose their right to remain in politics. But if they are removed from politics by undemocratic means, they will be able to generate public sympathy in their favour by showing that their rights of citizenship were being violated.

And the political histories of many developing countries, such as Iran and the Philippines, suggest that when popular leaders are cut off from their political bases through undemocratic means they make heroic comebacks.

Many people in the AL and BNP, and in the present government, believe that the absence of Hasina and Khaleda from politics will cure our political system. But is it really that simple?